It’s just a two-parter, but as history has proven with Bill Willingham’s Fables two-parters are a secret doorway to greater things. “The Destiny Game” (the opening chapter shipping this coming Wednesday, 10/24, in Fables #122) makes a powerful artistic statement about literature’s ability to resist time and history. And “The Destiny Game” makes this statement independent of the need to have read the 121 issues preceding this storyarc.

Just a handful of pages into issue #122, and Willingham sets up a peculiar artistic tension: Wolf writes about events in that past, when Big Bad chased a young girl through the Woods. Of course, nothing is as it seems—as powerful as Big Bad may have been in the Woods, he cannot match the girl’s sorcery. The unassuming shack she fled into is in fact her place of power. And gathered within is a collection of great heroes and kings, all turned to stone.

The girl’s power is the power of history itself, and history is a gorgon. It will turn triumphs and tragedy into material manifestation, and push them to a distance your emotions cannot access. On the other hand, Wolf in the future, writing about these events, shows a different power entirely—how writing resists the gorgon-stare of history. This tension is one Shakespeare understood only too well, and coded into his sonnet Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments….